


Anniversary Blues

by TinyFakeFanficRock



Series: Park's Quests [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Alcohol, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 05:45:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9370772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinyFakeFanficRock/pseuds/TinyFakeFanficRock
Summary: Cass, Arcade, and the Courier get drunk and talk about their daddy issues.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the Fallout Kink Meme.

Arcade didn't usually stay up this late, but neither did Bernie usually sit at the bar in the Lucky 38's cocktail lounge, matching Cass drink for drink. She hadn't quite been herself all day, really: it wasn't like her to deploy her grenade launcher when her pistol would do, though he doubted it made much difference to the Powder Gangers they'd run across. He'd asked what had her in such a mood, but she'd told him she didn't want to talk about it. Now that she'd started pounding back the vodka, however, he got the feeling that if he didn't press her and hung around long enough, she'd open up.

Cass, however, had not gotten the memo about not prying. "You're gonna fuck your shit up trying to keep up with me. What's wrong?"

"Rather not talk about it."

"You didn't give a shit back at the Outpost when I told you that about my troubles."

"That was business. This is different." Bernie threw back another shot, as if for emphasis.

"Bullshit. C'mon, at the rate you're putting that away, you're going to tell us anyway, so you might as well do it before you're slurring so bad we can't understand half of it and you have to stop in the middle to puke."

"Fine, asshole." She said it tiredly, with no real venom. "Thirty years ago today my dad died."

"Sorry. What happened to him?"

"He stopped breathing." Bernie gave her a long, flat stare. 

Cass was undeterred. "Well, no shit, but I was wondering what happened before that."

Bernie pounded her empty shot glass on the bar. "Okay, if we're really going to talk about this, I'm going to need some more goddamn vodka."

Cass poured a shot for Arcade and set the vodka bottle down beside Bernie, who refilled her own glass, took a deep breath, and began.

"I'm from Lost City, off the Long 15 northeast of here. We got a lot of refugees from the Legion. Mom was a medic with the NCR, and Dad was a caravan guard before they settled down and had my sister and me, so they both helped --"

"Wait, you have a sister?" If Cass hadn't asked, Arcade would have. This was the first he'd heard any mention of siblings.

"Yeah, Genevieve." Bernie winced, drained her glass, and poured another. "Well, had, I guess. She went New Canaanite as a teenager, and they have a dim view of people like me and Arcade. So she didn't take my first girlfriend well. Mom wasn't thrilled, either, but she still made Gen be civil to me. Then she died, too, in our early twenties. Stroke, the other medic said. Without Mom around to be mad at her about it, Gen told me she couldn't condone my sinful lifestyle any longer, or some shit like that, and said if I 'repented' we could go back to how things were. I didn't. She moved to New Canaan about fourteen years ago, and I haven't heard from her since."

"Damn. Sorry, Bern." He recalled his own terror of breaking the news to his mother and Daisy that there would be no Gannon grandbabies, and the cascades of relief when they'd been decent to him. He had only ever imagined the rejection Bernie must have felt, and drained his glass just thinking about it. Cass refilled it before he could wave her off.

"But yeah, back when Gen still spoke to me, Mom and Dad did what they could for the refugees -- Mom patched 'em up, and then if they wanted to go further west, and who the fuck could blame them, Dad would walk with them, keep the raiders off till they hooked up with a caravan. He knew all the roads. He'd been everywhere. Twice. He trained some of the ones who stayed to help defend the town, too. Taught me to shoot, taught me to play chess, taught me how to keep from being bored on really long walks."

"Wait, is that where you learned that dumbass song you were singing on the way back from the Outpost the other day?"

Bernie twitched as though Cass had caught her stealing and gulped a shot to try to cover it. "Me, singing? You must've been hearing things. Probably because you were drunk."

"What difference would that make? I'm drunk all the time."

Arcade couldn't resist poking at this sudden self-consciousness; Bernie generally gave the impression of being completely immune to embarrassment. "You sang?"

" _No._ " Bernie grabbed the vodka bottle.

"Yeah, she did. She sucks at it, too."

Bernie finished pouring herself a new shot and pointed at Cass with the neck of the bottle. "If I had sung -- which I didn't -- it would have been so fucking beautiful you'd have cried."

"Oh, I cried, all right. In pain." Cass relieved Bernie of the bottle and poured a shot of her own, setting it next to her ever-present whiskey bottle.

"Well, there's an easy way to settle this," Arcade said with a brightness calculated to needle his friend. "Sing us a few bars of something, Bern."

"Fuck, no."

"Yeah, I was strong enough to survive it, but you'll kill Gannon."

"Pah. I'm tougher than I look."

"Tell you what." Bernie ducked behind the bar and grabbed a stack of shot glasses and another bottle of vodka. She set the glasses in a row in front of Arcade, next to the one Cass had already refilled, and poured him three more shots. "If you drink up everything in front of you, I'll turn on the radio and sing along to whatever Mr. New Vegas is playing."

"Unless it's 'Johnny Guitar'," put in Cass. "Then I get to shoot the radio."

"Agreed," Bernie and Arcade said in fervent unison, then looked at each other and couldn't help laughing.

"You two are like an old married couple. Well, except the gay part."

Arcade rolled his eyes and took a shot. "Anyway, Bern, you were telling us about your dad."

"Yeah. My mom was smart and tough and awesome and I loved her, but my dad -- Dad was my hero. I told everybody I was working for the Mojave Express because the only thing that paid better was stripping, and I don't have the tits for that. Truth is, I took the job so I could travel like he did." Her voice was thick with something more than vodka. "I know this sounds weird, but it's actually harder for me to think about how he was than how he ended up. Makes me think what I missed.

"So. One day when I was seven and Gen was ten, about a dozen new refugees staggered into town looking even worse than usual. Said there'd been another ten in their group, but the Legion was after them and they'd split up to try to confuse the dogs. They'd gotten lost and wandered around the ass-end of nowhere for a while, so they expected to find the others already here and got scared when they didn't.

"Dad went out to look for the rest of them. He was gone three days. When he got back, he was still alone, and, well, he didn't really come back, either. Wasn't himself anymore."

"What happened to the rest of the group?"

"We don't know. All he ever told anyone was 'There's nothing left to find,' and when some of the other guys tried to retrace his steps later, they said they only found a shitload of ashes. They think he burned whatever it was he found. Goddammit, when I say it like that it sounds like some stupid campfire story -- 'and they never found the bodies!' -- but it's what fucking happened.

"The week after that, Dad sent us both to work with Mom, told us to help her out. We were so proud -- felt like real grown-ups. When we got home that afternoon, I went to the garden to start doing my chores, and Mom and Gen went in the house. Then Gen started screaming. Apparently after we left that morning he'd put his shotgun in his mouth."

Cass held up her hand. "Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa. Holy fuck. When we met, and I told you about how my dad was a good shot, you told me the shotgun you were carrying was your dad's. Is that --"

"The same one, yeah. I know, sick as shit, but it still worked and it was what I had. We can't all have dads who left us nice things like names and necklaces."

"At least you _have_ things from your dads," Arcade said. _Well, things that wouldn't get you hauled up in front of an NCR firing squad._ That thought was definitely worth another shot.

"At least your dad didn't _choose_ to leave you," Bernie pointed out. Cass nodded.

"At least your dad took an interest in you," Arcade told her. He'd always told himself that things would have changed once he was a bit older, but with three shots of vodka in him, he was starting to admit that was probably overly charitable. His father had always been preoccupied with his work -- _with doing horrible things for horrible people. What a delightful thing to prioritize over your family._ He threw back a fourth shot. It was getting really warm in here.

Cass took a long pull off the whiskey bottle before adding, "And at least you know how your dad died. Hell, what day, even."

"I'm so sorry you didn't get to find out what your dad's brain looks like as a spatter painting," Bernie snapped.

"Look, I didn't know my old man and I'm not that broken up about that, but I hated seeing my mom look out to the road five times a day, hoping his dumb ass would come back. It wasn't fair to her. At least yours knew when it was all over."

"Yeah, she --" Bernie cut off her own angry retort. "Fuck, look at us, trying to one-up each other with sad daddy stories. This is bullshit. Let's go to bed. I hereby adjourn this meeting of the Sad Sack Thirtysomethings With Absentee Fathers Society."

"Sad sack yourself," Arcade said, with perhaps the slightest hint of slurring. "I'm _fantastic_. Besides, I've only got one more shot to do before you have to sing."

Bernie reached over his arm, stole his last shot, and drained it herself over Cass's laughing cry of _cheater_. "Nope, you're cut off. Come on, lightweight, let's pour your ass into bed."

**Author's Note:**

> Lost City is the former Overton, NV, so named after the Lost City Museum there.


End file.
